Google’s Plan to Fix Email Is Deeply Flawed

On February 13, Google announced AMP for Email, an attempt to introduce some of the elements of its Accelerated Mobile Pages specification into email, putting the company’s high-performance web publishing system right inside the messages. Gmail will be the first email client to support these new features, which will give senders a way to deliver complex layouts and templates, interactive user actions, and dynamically updated content. That first implementation isn’t even ready yet, and yet already this is looking like a catastrophe. It should not be possible to design dramatic changes to our most widespread communication medium in secret and then deliver them in a surprise announcement! That completely misses the point of communicating.

AMP is a high-performance subset of established web technologies like JavaScript and HTML intended for mobile-first publishing. It was introduced by Google in 2015 as a somewhat more open competitor to Facebook’s embedded “Instant Articles” format; whereas Facebook renders third-party links right inside Facebook, Google created a zippy new quasi-standardized format for the rest of the web — and then took the additional aggressive step of serving them from google.com URLs and promoting AMP-formatted content in its search results. It has been met with suspicion, most famously by the the Register, which called it “bad in a potentially web-destroying way.” But it is certainly fast!

One optimistic view might be that AMP for Email is an attempt to open up functionality that already exists in Gmail — interpreting the links and other content of emails to present useful gadgets like package-delivery tracking — so it can be invoked more efficiently by senders without waiting until Google deems those functions worthy of special treatment. Skeptics will point out that Gmail has been the market leader in web mail for between 10 and 15 years, especially if you focus on personal use and ignore corporate and enterprise applications. If Gmail has become the dominant platform for email transactions, then AMP for Email could be considered a power play to create the new format, the unit of transaction being passed across an established open platform.

As used on the web, AMP restricts the broad scopes of web technologies until they are fast and efficient. The utility is less clear with email. Just consider the name of the product: “Accelerated Mobile Pages”… for email? AMP documents on the web are pages or even miniature interactive applications. Should we even be emailing pages and applications around at all? Dynamic content is a sort of bizarre concept for messages, the content of which could change after their receipt in ways that could undermine their utility or even their legal value. Richly formatted HTML email is widely loathed in comparison to plaintext messages, so this is a very strange horse to bet on. In contrast, the new Animoji feature on the iPhone X adds message interactivity in a trivial and superficial fashion, seemingly deliberately; upgrading the bones of email is a much bigger deal.

Most damning of all, AMP for the web is ostensibly solving a performance problem that simply doesn’t exist in the context of email. Bloated advertisements woven into the pages you want to see are a core part of the economy of the internet, and can kill your speed and battery life on mobile devices. In contrast, unexpected third-party ads in email messages aren’t a meaningful problem (outside of unsolicited spam, which is a substantially separate concern altogether). One of the fundamental miscalculations of AMP for Email is that it degrades the delivery speed of a medium in which nobody really likes rich-message content to begin with. AMP for the web was a faster subset of the standard web, but AMP for Email is a slower superset of standard email. The product name is a misnomer — it’s not accelerated at all!

There’s a steep cost: In order to add interactivity, AMP for Email executes JavaScript code in the messages for the first time, creating an enormous new target for malicious hackers. Google’s engineering and security are nearly always best in class, and you can be sure that the various scripts required for AMP features will be vigorously protected, but this is email’s biggest new attack vector since file attachments began carrying viruses.

All this to what end? AMP for Email may be an extension of email, but it is not a meaningful extension of email. There are some slick new display options, simple actions that could be accomplished with a link, a bit of that strange dynamic content, and not much else. And yet this will require carving out a schism between AMP and non-AMP email, between compatible and incompatible apps and clients. Just about one of the silliest things you can possibly do to a communication medium is artificially bifurcate it.

The reception has been largely negative, and at times even hostile. The comments posted by developers under the announcement are so far almost uniformly negative. “AMP for email is a terrible idea,” crowed TechCrunch, in what Google’s search product now presents as the top result. Maybe it’s actually a terrible implementation of an okay idea. Or, even more charitably, maybe it is just half-baked: The specification is presented only haphazardly in an “issue” post on GitHub — essentially a bug report — and a week or so after AMP for Email was unveiled, AMP tech lead Malte Ubl was posting comments like, “There should be a wider discussion as to whether it is a good idea in email,” and “The next thing is to discuss the topic in the AMP design review,” and “Totally agree that the forwarding behavior needs to be nailed down.” In a more reasonable version of this process, those steps would have been taken before an announcement.

To deal with email clients that don’t yet support the AMP for Email message format, the old plain-message format will be delivered alongside the newer version. Even beyond that inefficient redundancy, AMP for Email isn’t something that anybody will actually write directly because it uses specialized code. Generating the AMP messages will thus require new tooling and production systems, all of which will be completely divorced from the conversation flow of simple messaging, and will need to be replicated countless times over and built out on different platforms and devices. AMP implementation on the web has thus far proven to be a complete pain even for the biggest publishers in the world. AMP for Email now has an even longer road ahead with an arguably more stubborn audience. It is distinctly possible that we’ll never see authoring tools available in any mainstream email client for mobile devices.

Nonetheless, underneath its warts and the failure of process, AMP for Email still has the admirable goal of pushing our communication methods to evolve into something more sophisticated and powerful, possibly even more nuanced and expressive. The problem isn’t so much that AMP for Email is fundamentally a failure, exactly (although sure, maybe that, too), so much as that AMP for Email illustrates our failure to accomplish anything else in this space and the continued stagnancy of the most popular and widespread internet technology in history. AMP for Email is flawed and partisan and more than a little nonsensical, but it is also the deepest and best attempt to extend email in a very long time, because it is also the only attempt to extend email in a very long time.

And yet AMP for Email will probably fail, in part because it is not very good but also because most ideas fail in technology, in business, in the world. But the biggest flaw of AMP for Email is simply that it can’t reasonably be called version two of email. That isn’t Google’s fault — version two of email doesn’t exist anywhere else either. We aren’t even trying. That is such a profound moral failure that maybe technical failure was also inevitable. And so a lukewarm quasi-open standard pushed by a monopoly interest punts our indefensible collective apathy right into the next generation, deeply broken and silly and misguided but also, embarrassingly enough, still the best we say we can do. Watching something as important as AMP for Email land with a splat drives home the absurdity of the fact that in 2018 there’s still no equivalent to NASA for the internet — that is, some kind of well-funded public-interest research lab that could aggressively compete with the private tech sector in salaries and prestige. Instead, companies like Google get to decide how to build the future, and even how we will talk about the future before it gets here. One thing has already been made abundantly clear by the AMP for Email process: Even for Google, doing this properly is going to be a moon shot.

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THE FEED

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And yet we keep waiting

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.

Tech companies say that it is easier to identify content related to known foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter in 2017.

On Monday, for example, YouTube said on its Twitter account that it was harder for the company to stop the video of the shootings in Christchurch than to remove copyrighted content or ISIS-related content because YouTube’s tools for content moderation rely on “reference files to work effectively.” Movie studios and record labels provide reference files in advance and, “many violent extremist groups, like ISIS, use common footage and imagery,” YouTube wrote.

The cycle is self-reinforcing: The companies collect more data on what ISIS content looks like based on law enforcement’s myopic and under-inclusive views, and then this skewed data is fed to surveillance systems, Bloch-Wehba says. Meanwhile, consumers don’t have enough visibility in the process to know whether these tools are proportionate to the threat, whether they filter too much content, or whether they discriminate against certain groups, she says.

Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.

Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.

Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.

Rescue teams in Mozambique are struggling to reach the thousands of people stranded on roofs and in trees and urgently need more helicopters and boats as post-cyclone flood waters continue to rise.

Rescue workers, military personnel and volunteers are rushing to save thousands of Mozambicans before flood levels rise further, but with four helicopters, a handful of boats and extremely difficult conditions, have only been able to save about 413 so far.

“I don’t even know if we’ve made a dent. There are just so many people. The scale is huge. We’re busy doing the best we can,” said Travis Trower from Rescue South Africa, adding that a lot of people had been washed away but those still alive, whom he had seen from helicopter flights, were in a very bad state.

More than 400 sq kilometres (150 sq miles) in the region are flooded, according to satellite images taken by the EU, and in some places the water is six metres (19ft) deep. At least 600,000 people are affected, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ranging from those whose lives are in immediate danger to those who need other kinds of aid.

About 40 percent of the District’s lower-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013, giving the city the greatest “intensity of gentrification” of any in the country, according to a studyreleased Tuesday by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

The District also saw the most African American residents — more than 20,000 — displaced from their neighborhoods during that time, mostly by affluent, white newcomers, researchers said. The District and Philadelphia were most “notable” for displacements of black residents, while Denver and Austin had the most Hispanic residents move. Nationwide, nearly 111,000 African Americans and more than 24,000 Hispanics moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods, the study found.

In an essay accompanying the study, Sabiyha Prince of Empower DC said the city “rolled out the proverbial red carpet” for tens of thousands of new residents in the past five years. But the new dog parks, bike lanes, condominiums and pricey restaurants that followed, she said, are not viewed as improvements by long-term residents, who can feel isolated because of losing neighbors, social networks and local businesses. Prince, an anthropologist, said longtime Washingtonians tell stories of “alienation and vulnerability in the nation’s capital.”